Software developers, in particular Java developers, are often faced with the task of creating (e.g., hand coding) a large number of Java classes. In some cases, the Java classes comprise methods (subroutines) that merely “set” and “get” values corresponding to the data items defined in the class, and sometimes the number of “set” and “get” methods (e.g., Java “setter” methods and Java “getter” methods) is large, exacerbating the task of hand coding a large number of Java classes.
In many situations, the number and scope of the classes to be created correspond precisely to a known number and scope of other entities (e.g., a set of messages, etc.).
Legacy techniques to approach this arduous problem fall short. Legacy techniques operate by interviewing the programmer as to the fundamental characteristics of the class, and then the programmer manually types in such characteristics, one-by-one before such a legacy class generator (e.g., as might be found in an integrated development environment or IDE) can be used to generate classes. This falls short in at least these aspects: (1) for automatically generating a large set of classes, a programmer would want to merely specify the location of a list or hierarchy of objects, each of which is an entity from which a Java class is to be generated; and (2) a programmer would want to have some control over characteristics of the generated outputs (e.g., should the generated class be hierarchical or flat, and/or should the generated class use coding style A or coding style B, etc.).
None of the aforementioned legacy approaches achieve the capabilities of the herein-disclosed techniques for rule-based automatic class generation from a JSON message. Therefore, there is a need for improvements.